No abstract

The number of cochlear implant (CI) users is increasing annually, resulting in an increase in the workload of implant centers in ongoing patient management and evaluation. Remote testing of speech recognition could be time-saving for both the implant centers as well as the patient. This study addresses two methodological challenges we encountered in the development of a remote speech recognition tool for adult CI users. First, we examined whether speech recognition in noise performance differed when the steady-state masking noise was presented throughout the test (i.e. continuous) instead of the standard clinical use for evaluation where the masking noise stops after each stimulus (i.e. discontinuous). A direct coupling between the audio port of a tablet computer to the accessory input of the sound processor with a personal audio cable was used. The setup was calibrated to facilitate presentation of stimuli at a predefined sound level. Finally, differences in frequency response between the audio cable and microphones were investigated.

Cochlear implant (CI) recipients report severe degradation of speech understanding under noisy conditions. Most CI recipients typically can require about 10-25 dB higher signal-to-noise ratio than normal hearing (NH) listeners in order to achieve similar speech understanding performance. In recent years, significant emphasis has been put on binaural algorithms, which not only make use of the head shadow effect, but also have two or more microphone signals at their disposal to generate binaural inputs. Most of the CI recipients today are unilaterally implanted but they can still benefit from the binaural processing utilizing a contralateral microphone. The phase error filtering (PEF) algorithm tries to minimize the phase error variance utilizing a time-frequency mask for noise reduction. Potential improvement in speech intelligibility offered by the algorithm is evaluated with four different kinds of mask functions. The study reveals that the PEF algorithm which uses a contralateral microphone but unilateral presentation provides considerable improvement in intelligibility for both NH and CI subjects. Further, preference rating test suggests that CI subjects can tolerate higher levels of distortions than NH subjects, and therefore, more aggressive noise reduction for CI recipients is possible.